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My goodness, how the truth can be spun into webs of nonsense. An absurd amount has been written lately about how the government is ostensibly trying to impose censorship on an obscure religious magazine because of that publication’s politics.

If only it were true and that hard-left publications did actually lose some of their generous public finding but, alas, that simply isn’t the case.

The magazine in question is The Canadian Mennonite and all that occurred was that the Canada Revenue Agency reminded the editors that they were not supposed to dabble too often in obvious party politics. This came after several blatant partisan statements.

Before the May 2011 election, for example, the magazine told readers to vote for pacifism, social justice and environmentalism.

Which was code for voting anything other than Conservative.

It also attacked two Tory MPs for allegedly betraying their Mennonite principles, referred after the execution of mass murderer Osama bin Laden to “the takeover by a militaristic Conservative majority government,” trashed the government’s crime bill, and gushed about Jack Layton being a role model.

The writing is juvenile and the politics banal and blinkered, but that’s their business. Until, of course, it becomes ours.

You see, they benefit in all sorts of ways from being a charity under the Income Tax Act, and if you want the goodies, there are certain qualifications.

As audit officer Paul

E. Fournier explained rather gently, “It has come to our attention that recent issues ... have contained editorials and/or articles that appear to promote opposition to a political party, or to candidates for public office.”

Simple really.

You can write pretty much whatever you want, but if you do so you cannot hide behind the financial largesse of the taxpayer.

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s; or, don’t be hypocrites! Leading to various fellow travellers and tiresome anti-Tory types to moan on about censorship and free speech.

In fact, the Mennonites themselves can be a little fuzzy about free speech, as I found out when I was lecturer-in-residence at the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.

For a week I delivered a number of speeches on various theological and social issues, and was stunned how secular and even mocking of Christianity some of the students and especially staff were.

Many were also outraged and wanted me silenced for daring to say at a Christian college that Jesus was God, marriage was the union of a man and a woman, and life begins at conception. Perhaps I should have asked for a tax-break.

You see, while the Mennonites are divided and do contain many fine people, their left wing is powerful and, if you’ll forgive the phrase, aggressively pacifist.

This alleged pacifism — itself a misunderstanding of Christ’s teaching — translates less to deploring violence than to opposing the United States, capitalism, the West, and more recently Israel.

They’re intensely political and they detest the Conservative government.

And all that is being said here by the authorities is that nobody is above the law or the tax code, and that while you have a right to speak your mind, you need to do so with an honest heart and clean hands.

As Advertised in the Edmonton SUN

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Several centuries ago the peasants of England revolted against their masters and one of their leaders, a dissident cleric, rallied them with the cry, “When Adam dug and Eve span who was then a gentleman?”

I have written three books and numerous articles about the Crusades, slavery and the Inquisition, so I suppose I am, forgive me, somewhat qualified to discuss them. Not, of course, as expert as President Barack Obama, because he seems to be an authority on pretty much everything.